Shego on the Edge of Forever
by eoraptor
Summary: Who wants to live forever... when love must die?
1. Chapter 1

**_Shego on the Edge of Forever_**

_By Eoraptor_

_AN: Based on a Kim Possible Fan Fiction Challenge on KP Slash Haven. Rated T for Teen. Kim Possible and related characters copyright 2002-2007 Walt Disney Company. Not For Profit Work_

* * *

Shego scowled deeply, looking through the photo blog. It was getting to be that time again. People were starting to get curious why she looked so well preserved. Time to pull up stakes and disappear into some Amazonian backwater for a couple of decades. Or… or maybe Siberia this time, just for a change of pace.

Honestly, things had been so much easier before everything got computerized.

It used to be all she needed was a haircut, a good foundation cream, and a few thousand miles. Hawaii was always a nice place to hide out. But now that everything was computerized? Now that her face could be beamed around the globe in high resolution in a half a second? Along with her vital statistics, her blood type, and her sign?

The last time she had done this it had almost killed her. She spent ten years in Borneo after her brothers decided she was no longer welcome in Go City. Everywhere she had gone after "going evil" she had been instantly recognized. 1984 had sucked a big one. No Hawaii, no champagne on the maison du sol, no safari in Africa… because her damned face kept cropping up on every wanted poster.

Borneo was nice, but it was not Hawaii… it was a backwater and she had been bored out of her mind. And now even it had massive hotels and high speed internet connections.

She sighed as she folded up the laptop and sat it next to its older counterparts, the three ring binders, and the hand written journals. Man the old trunk was getting heavy. Maybe Drew had a shrink ray around the lair somewhere that she could use before she cut fence?

She was about to latch the trunk when she saw… it… and felt herself grow dizzy and melancholy with nostalgia. A cameo, over a century old now. The face on the exterior was nondescript. Some victorian woman in ivory from back when such things were legal.

She picked it up, determined not to open it this time. Determined not to get sucked back into that argument. And yet as soon as it was in her pale hands, she opened the cameo, and two yellowed photographs appeared before her. On one side, a brunette with a thick coil of hair folded intricately up and back in the late Victorian style. She had angular features, aristocratic and cool. And across from her, a ginger woman, her own hair less well maintained, a strand out of place and hanging across her forehead, symbol of her defiant nature and her penchant for going places women of that day were not supposed to go.

Shego sighed, her breath instantly ragged at the sight before her. With supreme force of will she clipped the cameo locket closed, only to be confronted with the back, an untarnished silver engraving…

Casablanca, 1907. Almost forty years before Bogey would make it a household name.

She'd been young then… and naïve. It had only been her second lifetime after all. She'd come out of hiding in a Utah mining town only a few years before, and taken up her mercurial ways. She still remembered enough of her antebellum ways to pass as a lady even after nearly thirty years in a mountain camp. The only things that had really changed were the fashions.

She fell in with… god what horrendous luck, a Lipsky. And that's when she had first crossed sabers with… her.

She'd escaped easily that first night. But the redhead… as all redheads were, was tenacious and furious. She chased Miss Gough around the globe. At first the flights had been frenetic, frantic, fraught with sparks and anger and violent clashes.

The scorned and scourged woman would show up in whatever corner of the globe Veronica Gough had set up her trade in, and quickly chased her out into flight again.

Back then it took weeks to travel, if not months, and so they had burned away three years' time without even noticing it. As the pursuit went on, the tone of it changed. It became less and less a cause for vengeance and more a game between the two. By nineteen oh six the two could practically feel the air vibrate when one or the other was near. And it was not an unpleasant familiarity. Traveling the globe in flight, they were the only constant to one another, a wanted woman and a woman who should be wanted but wasn't.

It was inevitable that the rivalry finally became completely friendly. Time and expanded horizons had cooled Miriam Possible's thirst for justice, but only served to expand her taste for adventure. And so it was that when she once again caught up to Miss Gough in a little melting pot on the north coast of Africa; that she didn't seek to immediately drive her quarry into flight again.

The two instead, had shared a slightly uneasy tea in the ancient Anfa district that formed the heart of the city. Well ancient by either woman's standards. It had only been there a few hundred years, compared to the entire area being settled for millennia.

One tea led to another, and to another, and to another. Eventually the two American expatriates became friends. And one night, after too much hashish-laced hookah and too much admiring of the sea breeze coming in off the Atlantic, they became more.

Miss Gough had known the touch of a woman before, from the time spent in the mining camps after the end of her first full life, but this had been different. No mere comfort between lonely women, the brunette felt her heart spring to life within her chest for the first time in ages. And Miriam… the young woman, the former journalist, the erstwhile criminal who could not return to her home; for her it was a haunting and almost shattering experience.

Together they learned that, here, in Morocco, where the European powers played at games, taboos about the love that dare not speak its name could be ignored, even in public to an extent. They spent most of a year together like that. Learning to feel things for each other that each had been taught, in a different time, that they were only supposed to feel for a virile, strapping man. The Cameo had been a seal of that. They each had one photo of the other in a similar locket they wore. A subtle symbol that they were each other's.

And then the French decided that building a railroad to the port was a good cause to invade the city on a permanent basis.

And it had all begun to fall apart. Even in their year of living as a defacto couple, Veronica had not shared her secret with Mim. That she was not the thirty two year old fallen woman from the mountains she said she was… or at least, that that was not all that she was.

But the French occupation began to show the differences in their temperaments. Miriam, the young firebrand that she was, wanted to help the local Muslims and Copts resist the French insurrection. Miss Gough, in a fiery debate fueled by too much Mediterranean wine and too much love, declared loudly that she had seen her belly full of war already, and why couldn't they just go to Cairo for a similar atmosphere, or perhaps to London or Paris now?

This had brought the younger woman up short. When had her lover been in any way involved in any war? Until just a couple of years ago they had both been safely ensconced in the United States after all; and aside from the Indian wars and the Spanish American War which had been a war in name only, what fighting had there been since the civil war when Veronica could have been, at best, an infant?

It was then that Miss Gough, in a fit of inebriated self-righteousness, produced an old journal. A journal about a celestial event of over fifty years before, which had granted five children on a farm outside of Go City with strange gifts, including immortality.

Mim disbelieved openly, blaming Veronica's taste for the stickier varieties of hashish for the origins of the strange tale. Until Veronica Gough's right hand erupted in a brilliant green flame and destroyed the crystal goblet she was nursing.

Veronica hadn't been born Veronica… and Gough was only one of a variety of surnames loosely resembling her own which she had used. She'd been born in the late eighteen thirties, the third of five surviving children on a family farm a few miles outside of what had then been just a small port town on Lake Michigan. When she'd been a teenager, her brothers and she had been playing by the river bank when they saw a strange multicolored light blazing through the sky.

When they awoke from whatever it had been, later to learn words like comet and meteorite, they had strange new abilities. Her oldest brother could pick up a fully loaded ox cart with one hand, her next oldest brother could shrink down to the size of a cricket at will, picking locks and the like suddenly as easy as arranging books on a shelf, her youngest brothers could, for some inexplicable reason, reproduce themselves ad nauseum.

And she of course, could make fire. As time passed, their abilities only grew. Herschel became all but indestructible, impervious even to the new conical bullets of the era. Myrum found he could shrink so far as to begin to see the underpinnings of matter itself. Her baby brothers became able to not only reproduce themselves, but anything that they were holding or wearing.

And she became able not only to make fire, but to hurl it and wield it as well as to be herself impervious to it.

This was shortly before the start of the war between the states, which would only later be so poorly named the civil war. And they threw their lots in with the Union cause in the ways that they could.

Her youngest brothers were able to marshal down entire towns in nearby Missouri, their powers stopped only by distance. Herschel was a one-man infantry division, wading through enemy lines in the middle of the night and destroying entire battalions worth of equipment with his bare hands. Myrum found his hand at espionage, many a southern lady unknowingly hosting him for hours at a time in the midst of rebel Generals in her bustles and bows.

But by the time the war was drawing to a close, a new wrinkle was making itself known. Their aging had been slowing down, and now, for the birth of photography, Miss Gorcheski and her brothers found that while the war badly withered their compatriots, from one year to the next they remained entirely unaged by the horrors of warfare.

By eighteen sixty four they seemed to have stopped growing or changing at all save for their hair.

And they knew this would raise problems. Already people commented on how well their palors faired compared to those of their families stressed by the waning conflict. Soon people would begin to question more openly why they were unchanging. People were a fearful lot, and the family Gorcheski would soon become objects of immortal fear for their strange powers and their unaging nature.

And so the siblings decided to fade away. The nation was vast and healing, and even with the telegraph, so long as they stayed out of contact with people they knew currently, no one would question a new stranger in a new town a few hundred miles away. After one tumultuous battle, they simply appeared on a list of those missing and presumed killed.

Herschel took to using shoe black and tobacco juice in his hair, Myrum and the twins simply moved to the east coast, and the young lady Gorchenski followed the railroads westward into the mountains.

Miriam had been… incredulous was perhaps the best word to describe it. Words like dysphoria and psychological trauma had yet to be coined.

And she had disappeared for days afterwards. But the passionate love they held drew her back finally, to the arms of the woman she knew as Miss Veronica Gough from Utah. They did indeed flee away, not to Paris or to Cairo, but instead, back to the States. They settled in a little mining town midway up the plateau in Colorado, as it was the only way that Miss Gough knew to hide in those days. They were able to live, if not as comfortable a life as they'd had in Morocco, at least a private one.

Few people knew them as anything more than a pair of spinsters who had gone west in search of fortune in the waning days of the frontier and stayed on alone in a cabin outside of town. It lasted over twenty years that way. But time began to tell on them both, because it began to tell on Miriam.

Love between them could not be quelled, but the life between them could. Miriam was into her fifties now, by the standards of twenties rural Colorado, an advanced age. A life spent chasing around the globe, and then busting trails and bounties in the still-wild west showed on her skin and in the iron in her hair. But her beloved Roni looked and felt not a day past thirty, if not younger. And now people, even in the small railway town of Lowerton, were beginning to question the relationship between the two.

They had tried moving… first up into Montana, and later into the Canadian Rockies, but life dogged them. They could not be as affectionate in public as they once might have been as Miriam advanced in years but Miss Gough did not. It broke Veronica's heart the day that someone asked her about her mother, the old iron-willed woman up in the cabin.

And it ripped her heart from her chest the morning Miriam told her beloved that she felt the number of her days. The old woman who had always looked the same in her partner's eyes wasted away quickly. Miss Gough did not have time to think on her growing frail and ill. In the span of one week, she went from being an indomitable spirit of the old Canadian west to being a marker on a tombstone.

Miss Gough stayed on for weeks at their cabin, marinating in the memories they shared, looking now at the lone locket, the one which contained both of their decades' old pictures. Miriam had been buried with her locket, its insides engraved with their younger likenesses by the most skilled silversmith in New York City, and Veronica had taken the real and less permanent photographs with her.

Finally, hunger drove her from the barren cabin. She could not die, not of dehydration nor of starvation, but she could still feel their bite. And it was that bite that made her set fire to the cabin so that she could not return to wallow in it.

By now it was the early nineteen forties. She was a hundred years old almost to the day. A war was on, and it made it easy for Veronica Gough to disappear, to become one more faceless factory worker in Detroit, and then a secretary in Washington, and then a house keeper to an ambassador in London. The years she and Mim had spent playing cat and mouse around the globe with each other at the turn of the century had served well. By the end of the Second World War, Veronica Gough went the way of Victoria Gorchenski before her. Just a memory, a past life to be put away.

She would repeat her disappearing act not long after the Korean War started, Vivian Gore dying in a plane crash off the British Isles in one of the first Comet jet commuters.

The sixties were incredibly fun. She was over a century old, and had a lot of sexual lessons she could finally share with an awakening sexual world. But with the passing away of the summer of love, she too decided to pass away for a time.

In the late seventies her brothers found her living quietly in Hawaii on a small island not many haole went to. With her thick black hair she passed well for a local, and since the Hawaiian language was long dead and native pride had not yet become a thing, not many questioned her family history.

Her brothers, it seemed, wanted to try being heroes once again, as they'd done a hundred and ten years before during the civil war. But they wanted to go back to Go Township, now Go City. Just like her, over the years their skins had begun to turn a bit colored, and with all the odd science popping up in the post-atomic age, they could easily pass for irradiate superheroes, since that's what they actually were, right?

Well, she'd grown a bit bored living on her little island, and was curious what the world of nineteen seventy eight looked like. Shego of Team Go was born only a few months later, after they had all used their century of knowledge to backstop their "origins." Sticking surprisingly close to the truth, they kept all the elements, and even went back to the old river bank; finding the rainbow-colored rock still embedded in the river mud south of the metropolis a hundred and twenty odd years later.

But the century plus was starting to tell on the woman now known as Shego. In four life-times, she'd grown lonely. Her one love, Miriam, was almost forty years dead, and even all the beautiful young men and women she'd known in the summer of love were now middle-aged suburbanites, their lives slowly ticking away.

Free to use her strange abilities openly for the first time in over a century, Shego reveled in the power it gave her. And her brothers became concerned. They'd all had families, multiple families. They had responsibilities, dynasties to protect, fortunes to arrange for. Shego had none of that. Her only true relationship had been a lesbian affair. She had no grandchildren to shield, no generational offspring to look down upon her legacy. Nothing to hold her back now.

It made her dark… avaricious, a malcontent during the darkest days of the stagflation era gripping the nation. The more she fought the burgeoning super-villains of Go City, the more she began to agree with their outlooks. Most people were stupid and deserved to be ruled by someone strong enough to take them over. The more she fought against evil, the more she came to like it.

Then Hego had declared she had gone rogue. He was not going to cover for his sister any more at the expense of his own fortune and his family's wellbeing.

She tried to go whole hog into super-villainy in the early nineteen eighties. Jack Hench had made it a growth market for anyone who wanted in by privatizing and legitimizing support services, from his first J. Hench catalogue flyer to his later days at the helm of the multi-national Henchco. She hooked herself up with the up-and-coming supervillainess of the eighties; but Electronique was scary. Just a teenager, she was possessed of both a frightening intellect and a frightening instability. Shego, as malcontent as she was, was not truly e-vile. And she feared what the young super-genius might be capable of if she ever learned the secret of Team Go and unlocked Shego's immorality to make it her own.

She cut her ties, found a really good foundation makeup, and went back to her island in Hawaii. Her brothers gave up Super-heroing not long afterwards, but did not leave Go City or their fancy new superhero hangout.

Vivetty Gou got herself a bachelors in Child Development from one of the University of Hawaii's outlying schools. Unfortunately, by nineteen eighty six, the internet had come to the fiftieth state. Someone recognized her picture from an old teletext from years earlier, which had then been faxed to the aloha state on a whim by some law hound in Go City hearing rumors about green lava erupting and matching it up with "Shego."

So she spent the next decade in Borneo. It was tropical, but not as well-connected or known as her little island in Hawaii.

Finally, she decided in nineteen ninety seven, that it was time to see what had become of the world again. She stayed incognito for a time, until she had the fortune, or misfortune, to run into one Drew Theodore P. Lipsky. Imagine her shock to learn that her onetime employer of almost a century before had somehow managed to find a woman willing to tolerate him long enough to let him touch her? And to have children, who in turn also managed to reproduce?

On a Tuesday morning, for nostalgia's sake, she revealed herself to him as Shego, the one-time heroine of Go City. She was still green after all, and it had only been a dozen years since she'd been active in the public eye, so she needn't concoct a whole new persona just for a college dropout. He was a bit shocked by her display, and dropped a test tube of chemicals on his foot, which in turn transformed him permanently blue.

Feeling sorry for the goof, she stayed on with him. Eventually, she found equilibrium with him. He had mad schemes he wanted to carry out… to gain revenge on his college roomates and the rest of the world. But he was not so evil or capable that he might succeed so she got to scratch her malcontent itch without any risk of actually endangering the world the way she might have done with Eletronique fifteen years before.

Ironically his ex-college roomates were people she had once known as Vivetty Gou from one crazy spring break in Miami in 1984. Ho Chen had given her one hell of a wild ride, but he kept trying to hook her up with his buddy Jimmy. Jimmy, it turned out, had already met a smoking hot redhead of his own, and wasn't interested, so Vivetty had discarded her plans for a menag'e'tois and gone back to Hawaii to finish up her spring break.

Things went fairly well for the four years. She pulled various pseudo-evil crimes and got to kick back as much as she wanted without fear of hiding her identity, since Lipsky, who had renamed himself Doctor Drakken, made a habit of living in hiding for both of them.

Then, in two thousand and two, Shego nearly died of a massive coronary. Mim Possible, her life mate, her soul and only, was staring her right in the face, in the heart of their lair. Mim, dead sixty years now, and not looking a day older than the evening they had first faced each other in Middleton Colorado one hundred one years before.

Only it wasn't Mim. It was Kim. Life had come full circle it seemed. And it had only taken four or five lifetimes. A Lipsky had scourged a Possible, and that scourging had brought a Possible back into her life.

Strange feelings boiled up in the heart of Shego, the villainess. Anger… Hatred… Vengeful wrath. How dare this… this… this uppity little bitch with the belly-bearing turtleneck have the unmitigated gall to wear her beloved's face as if it was her own?!

Shego did something to Kim that Veronica had never dared do to Miriam, or anyone else, even in the darkest days of their pursuits; she ignited her claws and attempted to kill her.

And did it over and over again for the next two years. During that time she learned more about the vexing brat. How Mim had not been the only rule-breaker in her family, how a great-niece named Nannette had joined the navy, and been a martial arts master; and how Kim herself could almost have been Shego's own daughter because the Jimmy of spring break nineteen-eighty-four was actually James Possible.

And all of it made Shego loathe the teen that much more. So much so, that she missed Drakken becoming more evil. New plots and plans; odious concepts like cloning and interdimensional travel. She helped him do things she had left to avoid helping Electronique do twenty years earlier, all because of her disgust that some girl dare wear the face of the one woman she had loved.

And then, one stormy spring night in two thousand and six, it all came crashing down on top of her, literally.

Her rage, her one hundred and one hundred and sixty years of life-experience, and her ego had all driven her to push Kim Possible hard for three years, and to push her right up to the very edge. And just like Miriam and Nannette before her, Kim had turned and pushed right back.

And pushed Shego right off a six story building and into a microwave transmitter which electrocuted her and crushed her.

As she lay beneath the debris of the tower, Shego found time to reevaluate. She felt pitiful and pathetic. Worse, she felt, for the first time in her five lives, guilty. She wanted to die, for real. She realized she could, at least, pretend to. She could crawl out of the debris, leaving nothing more than a pool of blood and some scalp behind, and Shego could die right there.

But Miriam would not let her. The ghost of her lady love demanded that she not put such a thing on the conscience of her descendant. And if there was any person, any one being over the span of over one hundred and fifty nine nine years of living and breathing on this Earth, who could make the woman now known as Shego do anything which she did not want to do, it was the one she had spent fourty years treating as her wife.

And so Shego crawled out of the rubble and allowed herself to be arrested along with Drakken.

It wasn't like any prison on Earth could hold Shego. Not even Kim Possible herself had been able to pin her down in three years' time.

But Shego was spent. Her spirit was broken by the events of that night in the rain. Miriam haunted her nightmares and the prospect of facing Kim again haunted her days. So she stayed willingly in prison for five months' time. Even when Drakken's idiot cousin Ed Lipsky broke her out, she did her damnedest to avoid Possible, going so far as to throw herself and Ed into the mud and getting re-arrested just to not face the girl.

Slowly her emotional wounds began to heal, and shades of the old Shego began to resurface. She rekindled a relationship with Senior Señor Junior, who was the son of a man she had known during that long hot Summer of Love decades before, though he seemed not to recognize her. That was probably the only reason she didn't bang Tony Junior's brains out, because god was he stacked and he was stupid enough to believe what she told and taught him. But it was a bit too much like incest, and even a hundred and fifty years of life hadn't quite erased that taboo from her mind.

And then the shit hit the fan. Electronique, now in her thirties and just as crazed as ever, broke free of prison. And she had created an insidious device, and used it on Team Go.

That should have been Shego's first sign that it was time to hang things up. Electronique and the other Go City villains might be too crazy to notice she hadn't aged in nearly thirty years… but sooner or later someone more sane was going to.

But that was not the worst of it. Over the years the person now known as Shego had grown dark. Not so dark as she could have grown; if she gave herself another say, twenty years as Shego, she could easily see herself becoming every bit as crazed as Electonique and trying to rule the world as some kind of supreme being; but she was still suitably dark for the electro-witch's device to seriously flip her personality around to the sweetness and light known as Miss Go.

And that Miss Go personality... her sixth life, or regeneration as the nerdy kids might call it… that super-saccharine bitch… that being of pureness and honesty… came within one second of spilling her guts to Kim.

All of it… the immortality… the true extent of her superpowers… her life with Miriam… and her hatred of Kim for accidentally wearing Miriam's face.

After that Shego had to withdraw. And she forced Lipsky to withdraw as well. They scaled back their plans, and save for one incident involving some pirate ancestor of Lipsky, and some really stupid plans involving a bogus college, she managed to steer clear of Kim for most of a year.

And then the Aliens came along.

Even Shego, who was only a bit shy of the old one-six-oh and at times felt every day's experience of it, was surprised by that one.

And they had won! Only by the skin of their teeth, and only by some kind of magical intervention (surprise numero dos!) but they had won! And Shego had been given a pardon for thirty years of criminal activity to boot!

That had been two years ago. And it had generated a LOT of press coverage of her, including all sorts of photos and even a spread in Playpen under the banner of "Green is the new sexy!"

At first, only a few images had popped up here and there. And they were regarded as mere curiosities… Oh didn't Shego look like this civil-war-era nurse? Oh wow, is this person Shego's grandma in the forties working at Lockheed? Dude, my grandpa says he totally scored with Shego's mom at Woodstock!

Now though… now things were starting to get complicated again. She had, it seemed, finally stayed too long in one lifetime again, just as Veronica Gough had a century before when she had fallen in love with Miriam Possible. It was a lesson her brothers had learned long ago, which she was only now learning to again appreciate.

And that wasn't the only complication.

Kim Possible was twenty years old now… the same age that Miriam had been when she had first crossed sabers with Miss Gough in nineteen oh three.

And despite what she had felt about Tony Senior and Tony Junior just five years ago…

It was becoming incredibly difficult not to fall in love with, and into the bed of, her second Possible woman.

And she suspected Kim was feeling the same way. Already the redhead and her blond boyfriend were in a cooling off phase, and Kim wanted to spend a lot of time with her sophisticated older friend Shego.

There were moments… moments washed in cheap red wine after a night out with Kim's other friends, when Shego found herself losing her restraint. Found herself wanting to repeat a long gone conversation from almost exactly a century earlier when she had pulled out a careworn journal and exposed her deepest secret.

So… it was time to go.

Shego needed to die and a new V.G. take her place. One who wasn't green and didn't have phsyics-bending super powers.

And once more came the complications. Her brothers had had some problems tracking her down in 1978. By '86 all it took to blow up her carefully constructed life was one ill-timed fax to the wrong person.

Now, in the twenty first century? Even if she wasn't on a first-name basis with one of the most leet hackers of the age? Well it would take only seconds to identify the only green-skinned woman in the hemisphere from orbit. And that didn't count legions of other less talented but eager trackers on the internet.

And worse… Kim Possible…

Mim Possible had chased her twice around the globe in an era when it still took weeks by steam ship to get any meaningful distance. Kim Possible was every bit her great great aunt's great great niece. And she had her own personal jet, as well as a pet nerd who could point any satellite within a lightyear to any target the redhead designated.

If… when Shego chose to disappear, Kim would find her within a day at most. Two, if the woman hid her skin and didn't use her powers.

So… how would Shego die, and Kim not try to come after her?

* * *

Kim was barely standing as she pushed her way into the small off-campus apartment. In fact, she wasn't standing at all. She was leaning against the door. She had leaned her way down the hall, after leaning her way into and out of the elevator.

In truth she hadn't been on her own two feet in probably twenty minutes, since leaving the Sloth and pressing her forehead to the front door of the apartment center. The Sloth which had self-driven her back here from Borneo after three days of trying to find where Shego had really gone.

Her best friend in the world supposedly had exploded in a glorious green fireball while trying to stop a rogue Lorwardian battle-tank which had climbed up out of the ocean three days before.

The redhead didn't believe for one minute that a woman she had dropped a building on could be stopped by tanks she had once ripped apart with bare hands; no matter what the impeccable forensics said.

In three days Kim had torn the globe apart to find the darksome woman. The tweebs had had to replace the jet engines in the Sloth, so hard had she pushed them.

Villains the world over were running scared from the unholy wrath of the redhead, and the only reason Drakken wasn't at the top of the list for having Shego was that he had been with Kim replanting Amazon rain forest at the time Shego had exploded.

Kim was running on zero hours of sleep and five gallons of Shock cola ingested sixty-four ounces at a time.

So needless to say, it took a good thirty seconds for Kim to realize that her face had hit the floor after her semi-conscious body had tripped over a large wooden footlocker planted squarely in the middle of the living room inside her doorway.

Once she turned around to look at it, and after another thirty seconds to process that there was a large emerald "S" on the lock and a neatly folded green and black cat suit sitting atop it, the redhead clumsily opened the unlocked latch and reached in to pull out an old, worn, leather journal with the name Victoria Gorchenski barely legible on the cover.

* * *

"Edwards?"

"Here!"

"Ekhart?"

"Here!"

"Florez?"

"Rodger!"

"No, the name is Sam… just say you're here."

"Oh, um… here?"

"Gomez?"

"Over here, smartass…"

Sam the flight director looked up, and arched a brow. "Vinchenza Gomez? Don't take this the wrong way… but you look almost exactly like that-,"

"Shego?" the half-hispanic woman rolled her green eyes and flicked a hand through her pixy cut black hair, smirking, "I get it all time. So much so in fact, that I booked myself on the first trip to Mars just to get the hell away from the comparison and the Shego fetish jerks."

"Heh… Good luck with that. Well welcome aboard Miss Gomez… I hope you'll like the red planet."

"Thanks, I just hope my tan holds up…" she grinned and returned her eyes to the view of the space station they were departing, and the monkey waving at her from the window, "And I hope there are no redheads…"

* * *

_AN: Not sure how well this will be received, and it's a bit rough, but I appreciate reviews and you can have a chocolate chip cookie if you do. (no guarantees your e-mail man won't eat the cookie before it gets to you though) Also remember to check out KP Slash Haven DOT net to see other people's responses to this chalenge.  
_


	2. Chapter 2

_**Chapter 2**_

The year was twenty thirty four. Professora Vinchenza Gomez was celebrating her two hundredth birthday. Well no one on Mars knew it was her two hundredth birthday, but it was a birthday and she was celebrating it withsome very expensive home-grown drink, along with her friends on the faculty of Mars University

Which was a huge misnomer, MU was a university in name only. It offered masters courses only in two fields, geology and in astrophysics, and was smaller than most community colleges on Earth. But, since it was the ONLY institute of higher education on the red planet; it was generously talked up as a University, and Gomez as professor even though she lacked a more than a bachelors' degree.

Then again, considering just about every "teacher" at the three elementary schools on Mars had learned from her, she'd probably earned the title if not the sheep skin.

At this point the well-preserved teacher had to stop, and consider the drink she had been served. Not because of who had served it, but because she was dead certain she was seeing things. No, no pink elephants or blue Lorwardians; no she was certain that Kim Possible was sitting, drinking a Martian Microbrew on the other side of the modest bar.

Sixteen year old Kim Possible.

Who in another life she had hung out over a lagoon full of sharks.

A quarter century before.

Which meant that Kimmie should be at least in her forties.

Vinchenza shook her head, hard. Then she looked at the Martian Scotch she was drinking for her birthday and wondered if the fact that it was distilled in 1/3 gravity had something to do with it. Or perhaps the genetically altered rye grown in the iron-rich Martian soil.

Whatever it was, Vinchenza slammed the shot back and turned the glass upside down over the bottle, signaling she was done with the rare, potent, and expensive drink. She was obviously seeing things. The last time she'd seen someone wearing that face, its previous owner had been sixty years dead, and she was pretty well certain that Kim Possible was still alive. Mars wasn't that remote that news of the first woman to break the light barrier being dead wouldn't make it all the way out here pretty quickly.

So yes, obviously she was seeing things. And feeling the effects of irradiated Martian alcohol. Vinchenza excused herself for some fresh air; fresh being a relative term considering it was all pressurized and regulated by computer and genetically modified plants… but it was "outside" of the bar, in the larger underground lava tube which the township of Burroughs inhabited.

"Professora Gomez?"

Vinchenza almost leapt out of her skin when she turned to see who had called and found Kim Possible looking up at her. Catching her breath, she looked hard at the redheaded apparition before her, willing away the alcohol.

No, the eyes were wrong… a bit too almond shaped, and the skin was too dark, less peach than olive tan.

"Yes?" She finally took a more calming breath, combing a hand over her undoubtedly red face.

Whatever the girl was about to say was interrupted by someone behind Vinchenza, "Sim, what are you… Oh. My. God."

Now that was a voice Vinchenza knew on the first syllable. She turned slowly and looked.

At first she saw nothing. Then she looked a bit lower…

In a wheel chair in front of her sat Kim Possible. And she was indeed the mature woman Vinchenza had expected when she had seen the other, younger girl inside the bar.

Apparently Kim was just as gobsmacked on looking up at the older, but younger-looking, woman. After a long moment, the elder redhead shook herself, "Sim. Go back into the bar. No more beer… for either of us."

"Huh? Why?" the younger version scowled.

"Because you're sixteen and don't know how to handle it, and because it's obviously going to my head too" Kim frowned at her daughter, knowing all too well how the younger woman could react to being told no. "Besides, your grandmother expects us both to be in there when she gets back from her buggy ride, and I need to have a conversation with… the professor."

Vinchenza watched a typical petulant teenage expression pass over "Sim's" face, but the adolescent eventually complied and left.

"Of all the gin joints, on all the planets, you had to walk into this one…" the Martian professor rolled her eyes in a way she had not done in a quarter century, "Well, roll into. And with a mini-possi to boot."

Kim flicked a few switches, and her chair metamorphosed into an upright standing rig, bringing her closer to eye level with her former nemesis and friend, "Yeah, well count me as shocked too. I roll out here to find my daughter talking to an older woman, and it turns out to be you?"

An uncomfortable moment passed between the two. Finally, Vinchenza broke it, "Sixteen and beer? That SOOOO does not sound like any daughter of Kim Possible I'd expect."

Kim shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest, "Well, it's legal here... and her father denies her nothing. There's no way I could have stopped her. That, I'm sure, you understand."

"Yeah believe me, if there's one thing I know, it's stubborn redheads," the teacher smirked and mimicked Possible's pose, "So…'Sim'?"

"Short for Simara. A variation of Samara." Kim smiled a bit, "It means Protected by God. Ron gave it to her."

"Funny I don't see a bit of him in her," Vinchenza shook her head a bit, looking at the door she had passed through. "Granted I only saw her for about thirty seconds up close…"

"Because Ron is not her father," Kim frowned firmly, chewing her lip. "God parent, yes... father, no."

"Oh?" the ageless teacher inclined her head at that.

"And I am not telling you who is… not now at least. Shego, why the hell are you here? On Mars?!"

"It's Vinchenza…" the woman corrected, "Shego died a long time ago. Just like Vivetty, and Victoria and all the others. I left that trunk with you for a reason."

"To explain to me why you left, I get that…" Kim scowled, "That really hurt, you know."

The brunette sighed and frowned, "No, not to explain to you… well not JUST to explain to you… to cut ties with Shego. Kimmie, that catsuit, that identity, that lifestyle… It was the most addictive and fun thing I've done in a long time… I did Shego for over thirty years, and if I hadn't stopped there, I would have continued to do it. And it would have put me in danger… and Drakken, and even you."

"How!?" Kim barked at her former friend, "How could staying have been any more dangerous than you already were?"

"Because people would have figured out my secret… they would have come after me. After all my friends, just to learn it." The former Shego held herself self-consciously. "And there were other reasons…"

Kim scowled, looking hard at the former villainess and waiting for an explanation. Finally she huffed, angrily, "Fine… keep your secrets."

The chair slowly began to pivot to take Kim away, when Vinchenza reached out, stopping her, "Wait."

"What, Shego?"

"Grrr… damned stubbourn redheads…" the professor growled, "First, it's Vinchenza. It really is. I know you don't exactly understand why, but I am Vinchenza Maria Gomez."

"And?" Kim fixed the woman with a look.

"And I… I want to talk." She sighed reluctantly. "There's… there's things I need to get off my chest. Things I should have said twenty five years ago, but was too chicken shit to do. Things I need to say to finally say goodbye to Shego for good."

Kim gave her former foe a long, hard look, "I'm not sure I can get rid of Sim for that long. It's not like Mars has an over-abundance of public amenities to keep her occupied."

"Oh Kimmie kimme kimmie…" Vinchenza smirked, adopting a rather cocky pose, "You're talking to a pillar of Burroughs Township and Mars University. "If she's anything like you, all I have to do is ask her to do me a favour and ask some people to stand in her way…"

"God… twenty five years and you're still evil," Kim sighed, rubbing a hand over her face.

"Like I said," Vinchenza smirked, already falling back into old habits of taunting the redhead, "It was a very hard life to give up."

_**-Shego-**_

Just as Vinchenza had told Kim, it was relatively easy to arrange a series of distractions for "Sim" Possible. First was a tour of the modest facilities of MU, including a "stress test" from her own faculty and the Psych department. She had no doubt that a daughter of Kim Possible would pass it with flying colors… so much so in fact, that if she didn't have something far more important to do she'd set it up herself just to _really_ test the kid's outer limits.

After that, Sim would be given the old prop wash treatment. She'd be asked by Professora Gomez's assistant to go and find some imaginary product for the teacher, a bucket of prop wash, a bottle of blinker fluid, a box of LaGrange points… It was a test the teachers liked to use to instill the importance of independent research, and pretty much everyone in Burroughs knew not to tell someone who came in asking for prop wash that there was no such thing but encourage them to look somewhere else.

Then there were other more minor things to occupy her; and obviously the young people on Mars rarely got to meet their kin from Earth, so answering questions would undoubtedly keep her unavailable as well. All in all, Vinchenza could have kept Simara busy the full twenty four point six hour Martian day if need be.

Taking a deep breath, she looked at the item in her hands. It was one of only two things she had brought with her from Earth that weren't the clothes on her back. And since she'd let her hair grow out a few years ago, she now needed it in the low Martian gravity.

She wondered what Kim would think; to see her long black hair once more held back by Miss Go's teal headband, as she pulled it on and slipped inside the Asimov hotel to look around.

She didn't need to look long, because the redhead was sitting in the modest lobby, looking for her in return.

Before Kim could say anything, Vinchenza held up a hand, smiling, "Miss Possible! A pleasure to see you after so long! Shall we dine in the bar, or would you prefer to take in the air of Burroughs?"

The once-teen heroine was stood up verbally by the uncharacteristic greeting, until she took note of the old teal headband. She considered the tall, bronze woman a moment. Finally, nodding, she sighed, "I'd like to go for a walk… or rather a roll."

One they were outside and relatively away from prying ears inside the pressurized volcanic cave system, Kim sighed again, looking up at the woman walking beside her, "I wasn't going to call you Shego. You didn't need to put on a show to keep me quiet."

"And how was I to know that?" Vinchenza smirked at her.

"You know me. And you know I can keep a secret when I need to."

"I knew you twenty five years ago. And given how you didn't seem happy to see me last night, I had my reasons to doubt your verisimilitude."

Kim sighed again and paused her powered chair's progress, "Okay, so I was a bit shocked… but look at it from my perspective… pretty much the entire human race believes you died in a fiery explosion twenty five years ago. I know the truth and even for me the old story is pretty deeply engrained… so to see you here… alive and well and hitting on my daughter?"

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa!" Vinchenza held up her hands defensively, "So not what happened. She got one word out of her mouth before you wheeled up and I was a bit dumb to even respond to that considering how much she freaking looks like you."

The redhead rubbed the bridge of her nose, sighing darkly, "Okay… that's… fair. I'm a bit over protective I guess."

"Like father like daughter huh?" The brunette smirked and shook her head, "I remember your daddy being more than a little concerned about you being around certain tall dark and handsome parties too…"

"Oh my god, you know?!" Kim paled noticeably in the sunlight piped into the cave from the surface.

"I know?" Vinchenza frowned, pursing her lips, "Kimmie, I was just joking about the time Junior showed up at your college and your father thought he was looking for you instead of m… waitaminute…"

Kim wouldn't meet the alien teacher's eyes now, and sighed deeply, "Yes. Junior is… is Sim's father."

"How in the hell…?"

"The same old way, Professora…" Kim rolled her eyes as she looked up at the former Shego, "Believe me… it's a… touchy subject. I had a wild drunken night with a Latin stud when I was twenty eight, and nine months later, I had a daughter."

"You… had a wild, drunken night…" the brunette openly disbelieved of the redhead seated next to her.

"Yes I did… it only takes one you know… or in my case four or five rounds…" Kim chuckled a bit darkly. "I was lonely, Ron was on a mission, Junior bought me dinner, and several glasses of some fancy red wine… He was… surprisingly charming."

"and you took Mister Toad's wild ride…" Vinchenza completed the thought, "Damn…"

"Well, it's not easy. Ron was not happy about who I had been with and what had become of it, even if we weren't together. And Sim's father, Junior… well… he and I have very different ideas about how to raise her. He's only slightly more mature now than back when you knew him. And he spoils her rotten, and it shows some in her personality."

"And you being the girl you are... excuse me, the woman you are, couldn't justify cutting him out of your life."

"Bingo." Kim sighed, leaning on the chair a bit, "Plus it's very difficult to say no to the Senior family fortune when you have a daughter to raise and can't hold down a regular job. And… I'll admit… the life style has its perks. It paid for this trip after all."

"And how did old man Senior feel about his precious boy consorting with his hero nemesis?" Vinchenza arched a brow at her old counterpart.

"Sim's Grandpa Senior passed away when she was two." Kim supplied after a moment, "Snow-boarding accident in the Alps, you know how he was. But I think having a granddaughter pretty much made him stop being a super-villain."

Vinchenza gave a dark shego'esque chuckle at thoughts of the old gentleman supervillain. "Hmmm… so, Kim Possible, the trophy wife…"

"Oh god no…" Kim shook her head hard slowly elevating the chair to its upright pose, "Never. There's a reason Sim is a Possible and not a Senior. Believe me, never try to tell a redhead who's just come through seventeen hours of labour that her daughter is going to have someone else's name. The police were called."

"On who?" the Professora chuckled and smirked, arching a brow.

"On both of us I think… I threatened to have all his felonies reinstated, he threatened to bring in his lawyers and take Sim… death rays were involved on both sides…" Kim shook her head in embarrassment. "Honestly… I'm hard on him, but he tries… hard. And the child support checks have never been late, even when I was on the moon ."

"He still a good lay?"

Kim went wide eyed at the question. After a long moment, she gave a small bark of laughter and shook her head, "I was drunk that night… but I remember being… satisfied. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you. Not that he hasn't tried."

Vinchenza smirked wickedly, "Yeah… I was surprised by him. We never did it… but he once told me… il suono di una donna in calore mi suscita."

Kim laughed instantly, "Yeah that sounds about right."

Vinchenza chuckled along with her old foe and friend for a moment. Then she considered her in whole, "Now… what about this?"

"This?" Kim looked down at the chair holding her up. "This is a… a reminder that I can do anything, but I'm not indestructible."

She began rolling forward again through the surprisingly well-lit cave beneath the Martian mountain, "A few months after Sim was born, I was back to work with Ron. Incidentally, he's as bad about spoiling Simara as Junior is. I swear if she wasn't _my_ daughter she'd weight two hundred pounds with all the food Ron shows her and all the toys Junior buys her. Anyway…"

As they moved along, Kim related the tale, "A burning building, a bunch of kids who are crying and trapped by fire in the corner… Me with my battle suit and feeling twenty nine and invincible and righteous, I held up a collapsing beam until Ron came to help get them out with that goofey manner of his and some monkey magic."

The redhead looked up, considering the large fiber optics that brought light into Burroughs from the weak sun on the surface, "Well, My luck ran out that day… a flaming four by four wooden beam slipped out of my hands, knocked me over, and snapped both femurs through my suit."

Vinchenza hissed and winced. She'd had that experience herself, and it was decidedly… unpleasant. "So… if you were in the battlesuit?"

"That's the reason I have legs at all, most people don't get to keep their lower extremities when a three hundred pound flaming timber drops on them." Kim sighed as they traveled through the edges of the modest Martian town named for a long dead author, "I suppose I should clarify. I _can_ walk… months of surgery and rehabilitation saw to that… but the nerve damage and the muscle damage are still there. I can't just run up the side of a building the way I used to, or pull off a triple backflip from thirty feet in the air. The suit does most of that work now. Here on Mars, well with the difference in the gravity, my legs just aren't quite up to the challenge of adjusting."

Vinchenza sighed darkly, feeling torn. She wanted to hold and to comfort the redhead… but she also wanted to do nothing of the sort for all the problems it would bring her. And then she realized this was all over a decade past.

"Okay… wow. I never heard about that."

"Not surprised… Wade and SSS worked hard to keep it quiet. If people knew that I was a gimp without the battlesuit I'd have twice the fight on my hands."

Again the brunette considered the redhead, shaking her head. This was the first time one of her old lives had come back… to know that people she associated with had moved on, had momentous occurrences in their lives… Before it had been a matter of lifetimes, and generations; between Lipskys and Possibles. Now it was much more personal.

"Damnit…"

"What?"

Vinchenza sighed darkly as they walked, "It's… a weird sensation… the thoughts… that I… that Shego could have been there. I could have held a burning beam up for hours and gotten nothing more than a suntan."

"Shego, we all have choices to make…" Kim reached out to the taller, darker woman.

"Not like me…" She sighed bitterly, "Kimmie… I know it's stupid to talk to you about this because it's outside of anything you've ever heard of."

"Oh, you mean like being turned into a small orange monkey, or having purple goo in every orifice to travel faster than the speed of sound… or spending seven hours on an alien warship with a man who had a pansy growing out of his ass?"

"Okay okay," Vinchenza held up her hands, breathing out, "Maybe it's not TOTALLY outside of your experience. I'm just… it's… weird… when I fell in love for the first time; there were books I could read to see that other people had felt the same way and I wasn't alone in the things I was experiencing. But this?"

"Well Everyone falls in love, She- Erm, Vinchenza…" Kim nodded as they continued again along the lava tube, "But I guess you're right, you're situation is kind of unique."

"Only four people like me… and they all have dicks," the brunette shook her head and smirked. "God, listen to me… I don't talk like this anymore, don't act like this anymore…"

"So what do you sound like and act like?" Kim inclined her head, making sure to stay on the paved path with the wheels of her chair. "I notice you're not green anymore."

"Yeah, well mostly it's makeup. Being here on Mars, the sun isn't so strong so I am not so powerful or as… green. Kind of like Ultra Guy that way. I'm a teacher, and I'm a deputy for the Sheriff's department… I'm a bit of a sop when you get a few Copernicus Coppers in me… and I've won the Karoke contest three years running with These Boots." The Professora commented as they traveled down the lava tube towards the large dome sealing the entrance to the cave system.

"You? Back to being a hero?" the elder Possible disbelieved. "A cop even?"

"Hey, Two hundred years is a lot of life experience…" the brunette supplied as they came to the large sideways-mounted dome, looking out of its several windows at the afternoon sky and the Martian summer beyond. "And a lot of skills to call on. Some I don't even remember I have till I use them. And here on Mars we all have to do multiple jobs… you'd have got on here just fine Miss-I-can-do-Anything. And incidentally, you didn't say happy birthday yesterday…"

"That was your birthday?"

"Yup, the big two oh oh… In Earth time at least," She smirked, "Since years are twice as long out here, it's hard to keep track. Eh… the joys of interplanetary living."

Kim shook her head as she too looked out at the desolate but colorful landscape beyond the dome, "You're right… no one ever wrote about those kinds of life problems…"

Vinchenza was about to respond, but then stopped, looking over her shoulder, "She even runs the same way you do… did… and I can't believe I can still hear that coming without looking."

"Mom, Miss Gomez? Do you two know each other?" the younger redhead approached them from behind a bit uncertainly, "I mean, this is the second time you two have been talking alone."

"Oh, she's good," Vinchenza imparted to her counterpart as they continued to look out at the view of Mars, "You didn't teach her that, did you?"

Kim simply shook her head at the vague question.

"What are you two talking about?"

"Oh, you can drop the act now, Spunky," the brunette sighed and turned to face the teen, "I know that you know who I am."

"Wha-?"

"Wow, that's really convincing… you could teach the kids around here a thing or two about shitting their parents…" the Professor rolled her eyes, her smile degenerating into a much more cutting smirk, "But like I said, the jig is up. I'll bet you even had mommy sold that this was just a college visit, didn't you?"

Beside her, Kim shook her head sadly, rotating her chair around, "Yes, she did… but now that you mention it, it really doesn't add up why my daughter would want to come all the way out to Mars to a small town school with no amenities and no athletics."

"I guess she was working reverse psychology on you. She knew you feared her going to a party school and wasting her college years away, so what better school to suggest than the one school in the human system where partying is all but impossible?" the Professora sized up the apparently cunning teen as she adjusted her teal headband.

"Uuuugh!" the younger redhead huffed in frustration, "What gave me away?"

"You over-played your hand." Vinchenza answered honestly, "You could have come to me at the school just fine as a prospective student, but you didn't; you ran me down at a bar, trying to introduce yourself. That by itself wouldn't have tipped me off, but you knew me by name and by sight. And you followed me out of the bar before introducing yourself, meaning you were waiting for something specific, me to be away from other people. Your mother didn't even know I was on this planet, but you did. And now here you are again, following us when you're supposed to be touring the school."

"Why, Sim?" Kim frowned at her troublesome daughter.

"Incidentally, I like that name," Vinchenza smiled, considering the teen, "Simara… Protected by God, Guardian… will suit you well if you continue into the family business."

"Because… Because only five people have ever fought my mom and won!" the redhead clenched her fists, "Two of them are the Lorwardians, Wormonga and Worhoq, and they're dead. Two more of them are ninjas at Uncle Ron's school, and they make a point of avoiding me."

"And that leaves… Shego," Vinchenza completed, shaking her head slightly, "Forget it, kiddo… she's dead too."

"Uh, no you're not…"

"You really don't know what you're talking about, Spunky…" the brunette shook her head, sighing, "Shego died before you were born."

"No!" Sim stamped her foot against the red paved block floor, "You are her! You're Shego!"

The reaction was instantaneous; Vinchenza reached across the distance and tapped the petulant girl on the forehead with her index finger. The teen crumpled to the ground instantly.

"Shego!"

"Don't. Don't make me do you too, Princess…" the stressed teacher glared at the middle-aged woman. "I can't have mouthy little brats running around screaming things that might raise questions. Besides, it's just a love tap, I've done them to you too. She'll wake up in a few minutes."

A few minutes later found the three women in an abandoned branch of the lava tube system of Burroughs. It was long, and wide, with a flat dirt floor and an overabundance of the fiber optic daylight.

"W- where are we?"

"Oh, you're awake?" Vinchenza looked at the girl as she blearily looked around, "Good. Thank your mother for driving you down here."

The teenaged redhead sheepishly climbed up and off of her mother's lap and stood back as the elder turned her chair around and stood up in it.

"She- Vinchenza, where is here anyway?" Kim looked around at the cave.

"It's called Fools' Gold," the professora looked around the well-lit area as she shook her head, "About ten years ago an investor paid Burroughs government to have this branch of the lava tubes pressurized and leveled and lit. Figured on using the area to farm grains to make whiskey and beer. The investor pulled out and moved his operation down to Asimov when he realized that in order to make enough booze to turn a profit he'd need about five times the area."

She clapped her hands as she returned to the two Possible women, "And since Burroughs population doesn't need any more living space or crop space of their own, here it sits. I figured it was the only place we could go to talk privately that didn't require a space suit and someone noticing us needing those suits."

"Now look, Spunky," She readdressed Kim's daughter with a more firm tone, "I don't know who you think you are… but Shego is dead. I gave up a lot of things to have my privacy and my peace out here, and I'm not about to have you threaten it. So you're going to tell me just what it is you want from me, and I'm going to give it to you so you shut up and go away…"

"…" Kim opened her mouth to redress her old foe, but had to stop and mentally correct herself, "Professora Gomez… that's my daughter you're taking to…"

"Which is the only reason I'm going to give her what she wants instead of putting a needle hole in her space suit and sending her out for a walk." The dark haired woman sighed, tapping a finger on her rigid headband. "Mars is a dangerous place and accidents happen here, and if she were just another college student looking for kicks one would happen to her. But since she's a Possible, One, I can't assume she'd actually succumb to such an accident, and Two, even if she did, more of you would come looking into her fate."

"You're still evil," Kim glared at the woman standing before them.

"No, I'm a pragmatist. Everyone on Mars is. Martian life is a hard life. But it's a life I enjoy. Kimmie… I'm not kidding you… I'm not evil, but I'm not…" The immortal teacher sighed, peeling out her headband and twisting it slowly back and forth, "Eh screw it. Kid, what is it you want from me?"

"Fight me."

"What…? I think the thin air is getting to you…"

"No!" Sim stamped her foot yet again, raising a bit of red martial dust, "I want to fight the woman who fought my mom to a stand-still!"

"Sim…" Kim shook her head, "Is that really what his is all about?"

"Seriously?" Vinchenza looked at the girl and shook her head, easing her fingers through her freed hair, "Your mom was right, you really are spoiled."

"No!" the girl glared at them both tears threatening at the corners of her eyes, "I'm supposed to be the prophesied daughter, the girl who can do anything! I have money, and I have power, and I have skill! What does any of it mean if I can't beat the people who beat my mom? If I can't prove it?!"

"Simara… you don't have to prove anything!" Kim shook her head sadly, "It's not important who I used to face… you have your own life to live and I hope to god you never have to face the things I did!"

"Listen to your mom, Simmy…" Vinchenza shook her head, "You don't want to have someone try to put a sexy exploding android in your bed on prom night like her old foes did… But… if this will make you happy, and I don't think it will… Well, let's see what you got. Just remember, Shego died twenty five years ago; I'm not that woman anymore and I haven't used those moves in a long time…"

The younger redhead sniffed and nodded, moving out into the open space of the cavern and striking a pose.

"Shego… if you hurt my daughter…"

"You'll what, roll over my toes?" Vinchenza snorted irritably as she walked out to face the teen, "And stop calling me Shego!"

The fight began predictably, with the immortal and the teenager circling one another, searching for an opening. The redhead found one first, leading with a series of rapid punches that put the professor quickly back on her heels and bruised her arms.

The brunette countered with some blocks and retook the initiative, hitting back hard. But after five minutes neither of them had really gained or lost any advantage. And Sim's youth and training were starting to tell; the redhead was young and in shape, while Vinchenza was no longer the mercenary soldier she had been.

Then she realized that that was the problem. She wasn't fighting, she was giving a demonstration. She was treating this like a sparring match. She wasn't even teaching Sim the moves Kim might have seen once upon a time.

Shego didn't spar or hold back. Well, if Simara wanted Shego…

"Seriously… this is all you got? Twenty five million miles just to prance around and piss on my shoes?" Vinchenza flattened her hand and slashed out with the tips of her fingers and her hardened nails.

Sim dodged backwards, but not fast enough, and felt her clothes get caught and sliced by the nails. Frowning, she stopped keeping inside with the taller woman. "I'm pretty disappointed if this is all you've are. My mom is the best, and this doesn't even count as a morning workout."

"All I am? Kid, this isn't even a fraction of what I am…. But if this is all you are, you owe your mother an apology, because it's fucking pathetic." The professor drove her fingertips forward, right at Sim's forehead.

The redhead ducked, and then yelped when the immortal's fingertips struck the rock behind her and threw off sparks.

"And another thing, you worthless little cum stain…" Vinchenza growled, slipping back into old roles, feeling old patterns return to her, searching for every weakness, and suddenly seeing them all, "I'm through playing games with you."

Suddenly the tempo of the fight, which had already been impressive, doubled. Punches followed kicks, pirouettes ended in back fists, and every breath came punctuated with an insult. Vinchenza Maria Gomez began to sink away, and Shego climb up and take her place.

"Look at you… the gravity here is one third of Earth's and you're already breathing hard! Stop sucking air!"

"What the hell was that? A punch? Your mother's dildo probably hits harder than that!"

"Oh, are there mosquitos in here, or was that what you call a kick?!"

"Oh come off of it spunky, you haven't landed a hit in thirty seconds… give it up now you little brat."

Sim glared daggers at Professora Gomez as she tried to catch her breath. Then she grinned to herself. She'd seen enough images of Shego fight in mom's archives. She knew what to expect, and what she expected was a lot of strength, clawed gloves, and fire. None of those things were happening.

Simara crouched and then, using the lowered gravity that the professor kept taunting her with, launched herself right at the older woman, feet pumping away hard.

The teacher had been waiting for this. When Sim Possible was just two steps away, she flipped up her hand and ignited it right in the girl's face. The response was exactly as she'd figured from someone who had never faced real plasma heat before. Instinct took over the teenager's body and she back-peddled.

Or she tried to. She had been in the middle of a full speed charge when her hindbrain took over, and combined with the alien gravity, the girl began falling backwards as her legs went one way and her momentum another. Vinchenza helped her along by flicking her in the forehead with one flaming finger.

When Sim regained her footing and tried to get out of the way, Vinchenza cackled evilly, making a game of hurling fireballs at her each time she tried to move. She kept getting closer and closer with each shot until the girl realized she couldn't move at all, her arms and the sides of her face pink from the heat of the fireballs, her sleeves browned in a few places.

She glared hatefully at the woman standing over her, "Well… finish it!"

"Gladly," the former Shego drew her hand back and ignited her fist before pouncing upon the teenager, intending to shatter her face with one enhanced punch.

Until she didn't. She flicked the teen on the nose and snorted derisively, "You lose, kiddo."

Sighing, and pulling her hair back, straightening it and putting back in the antique headband, she shook her head, "Do you understand why?"

"You have superpowers."

"That I do… but it's not why I won."

"You're adjusted to the thin air and the low gravity and I'm not."

"You have a point, but again not why I won."

"You fought my mother and knew all her moves!"

"Kid, until an hour ago I hadn't done more than pull the trigger on a tazer in fifteen years. You should have the advantage on knowing moves."

"Then why?!" the redhead barked with frustration.

Vinchenza shook her head and took a deep breath. "Your mother is one of the greatest hand to hand fighters in the human world because she fights to win. Every time she throws a punch, her objective is to put down her opponent as fast as possible and move on to the bigger, more important goal of saving the world. She's fast, she's accurate, and she is brutally efficient. The same with Shego. When I was Shego; I fought to win. Take down the intruder as hard as possible, using any technique, object, or dirty trick available, so I could get back to doing what I was doing. The fight was just means to an end, a way to deal with a roadblock."

She straightened her collar, sighing as the adrenaline slowly began to leave her system, "You weren't fighting to win. You had no goal beyond 'beat Shego,' so you were just fighting to fight me. Truth is… if I really was still Shego? You'd be crippled or dead, and it would have happened a lot sooner. Ask your mom."

"And speaking of your mom…" Vinchenza turned to face the mature redhead, who had an unreadable expression in her jade eyes, "I am in a deal making mood. Kimmie… you up to it?"

Kim frowned, looking at the un-aging woman, who looked so much more like Shego now than she had just ten minutes ago, "Depends on what it is?"

"You want something from me, just like your daughter. Difference is, unlike with her, with you I know exactly what it is." The brunette grinned darkly.

"I didn't come to Mars to play headgames, Shego." The redhead glared.

"No, you're daughter did. Buuuuut," She grinned, stepping closer to the redhead and her power chair, "I know you want to play this one. And I know you don't back down from a challenge."

"Fine, what's your game, Shego?" the redhead glared.

"I'm not…"

"No…" Kim interrupted, holding up her hand, "You're Shego. At least right this minute you are. Maybe an hour ago you were Vinchenza Gomez and I can tell the difference… but this? Fighting? Calling my daughter names? That's Shego. You didn't even correct me a minute ago when I called you that."

"Okay fair enough," the professora shrugged, turning to Simara, "See kid? This is why _she's_ Kim Possible."

Sim rolled her eyes at the interplay. Still, it was strange. She'd seen her mom banter with people before, but never like this. Never as an equal. It scared her, for both of them.

"Alright Shego. Name your game."

"No game…" the dark woman shook her head, smiling gamely, "See, this one here got me all warmed up… but I still ain't fought a real Possible. Stand up… stand up on your own and punch me… and I'll answer any question you have. Your girl can even listen in if she wants."

"Shego, I already told you I can't-"

"No… you told Vinchenza some panty waste story about how you couldn't walk on Mars," the awoken bad girl sneered, "Me? Shego? What you keep calling me? I know you. And I know the girl who can do anything isn't going to let a little thing like two busted legs stop her from getting what she wants. Now stand your ass up, put on your big girl britches, and hit me."

Kim glared daggers at her nemesis. Part of her knew she was being baited, and that it was her own fault for calling out the dragon, but right now she didn't care. Snorting irritably, she unclipped the buckles across her stomach, and then her thighs. Then looking as much at her own legs as at Shego before her, the redhead pushed away from the upright chair

She took one uncertain step forward. And then another. And then she began to fall forward.

Vinchenza darted forward to catch her, cursing her moment of pride for goading a crippled woman.

And when her head cleared, she found herself laying on the ground, the left side of her face screaming at her.

Kim stood above her, her hands interlocked from where she had hammer fisted the dragon woman, "That is for calling my daughter a cum stain."

The immortal woman spat out a mixture of saliva and blood and grinned, sitting up, "Kinky… I like it, very underhanded, Princess. Okay… I deserved that… but she wanted to fight Shego. And you know name calling is part of the game."

"And you know it's not a game," Kim glared at her. After a moment, she relaxed her hands, allowing them to drop to her sides. "It was never a game between us and I thought for a minute you might…"

"Hey, Spunky," Vinchenza reached into her pocket and pulled out a Phoban dollar and turning to the freckled teen, "Your mom and I need to talk about some adult stuff… go find yourself a cute farmboy and make him buy you an icecream."

"Ah… farm girl actually" Kim corrected the instructions as she watched the face of her oldest foe, marveling at the sudden change.

"Really?"

"Yes Shego… my daughter is homosexual… Is that a problem?" the elder redhead rolled her eyes.

"Oh, well in that case, here's two bucks… find a nice girl and go dutch."

"Mom?" The teen looked at her mother, who hadn't taken a step since waylaying Shego, with obvious concern.

"Sim…" Kim sighed deeply, shaking her head, "You and I are going to have a long and righteous talk about all of this later… but yes… for now I need some time alone with Shego… and you are to keep your mouth shut about all of this or so help me I will beat the Italian out of you, got it?"

"So what, you can threaten child abuse, but I can't even call her names?" the reborn Shego rolled her eyes, "Harsh. But hey color me impressed. When I was growing up, the threw you in a mental institution for being anything other than straight… now I hear tell they don't even have parades for it anymore."

After Sim climbed back up the path out of the abandoned "field," Kim let go a ragged sigh and carefully moved around until she could rest a hand on the wheel chair. "Alright Shego… time to pay up… Why."

"Why what?" the professora with so many names slowly got to her feet, watching the redhead.

"You know Why What… Don't make me say it."

"Ah, but I'm a teacher… in fact, I teach other teachers… 'Why' is not a question, it's just a subjectless preposition." The brunette smirked wickedly as she moved closer to the redhead.

After slowly turning herself about and leaning against the upright chair, Kim let go a put upon breath, "Fine. Why did you leave Shego? You know I could have protected you. You just explained to my daughter why."

The darker woman paused. She had envisioned giving a quippy response to this question, maybe followed up by sneaking a kiss from the forty five year old redhead, but that all died on her tongue in the face of the words spoken.

"I… Look, it's,"

"And don't tell me I wouldn't understand." Kim gave a weary glare at her counterpart, "I certainly could have tried. Did try in fact."

"I you tried, then you know about Mim."

"I know about Mim, yes. I understand that I resemble her a bit."

"Kimmie," the immortal woman sighed and opened the neck of her blouse, pulling out an ivory cameo, "If that's what you think, you don't understand a thing. You don't just resemble her, you ARE her. At least physically."

As she handed the cameo to the redhead, she continued, "And when I first met you… I hated you with every fiber of my being for that. And that hate went on a good long time."

"Explains the sharks…"

"Yeah, explains the sharks." She continued as she started pacing back and forth, "Anyway, it hurt. In ways you can't understand without being two hundred years old, it hurt… to see the face of someone you love and know they don't even know you exist or what went before. And once we weren't enemies any more, once I spent time with you and got to know you, the person…? When I stopped hating you for looking like Miriam, I started to have feelings for you too."

She kept pacing back and forth as Kim converted her wheel chair to a sitting position and then sat down into it, "And from there it got really confusing. When Mim and I fell in love, it was this incredibly new thing for both of us. But then… with you… everything was happening the same way all over again… we fought… we teased each other… we became friends…."

"And we were starting to become more," the redhead sighed as she fastened the buckles on her chair again. "I know I felt more… I didn't realize it back then, but after you were gone it threw everything into stark relief. I wasn't just looking for a missing friend when you 'died,' I was looking for someone who was more important."

"Exactly," the Martian professora scowled, "the lines of time were starting to blur for me… when we'd be watching the Memopad and sipping wine, one moment I was there, and the next moment I was with Miriam in a parlor in Morocco listening to the sitar. I couldn't tell if I felt what I felt for you, or if I was having some kind of perverse detailed fantasy about my wife. Hell, I'm sure at least once I actually called you Mim and you just failed to notice."

Kim sat, looking up at Shego. As she saw the stresses in the face of this long-lived woman, and then looked to the cameo she'd been handed, she began to appreciate that it wasn't just words. She really couldn't grasp the emotions that Shego, or Vinchenza, or Veronica or whomever, was relating.

"That's insane…"

"That's how I felt. And god help me when I saw that little Simmy of yours yesterday? I was sure I'd had a psychotic break." Vinchenza held her head softly. "It took me all night to figure her game. A younger version of me, like Shego, probably wouldn't have and would have gone insane and tried to kill you both."

Kim shivered in her chair at the thought, recalling the words that this woman had thrown around before and during the fight. To this day, she had difficulty reconciling the Shego who tried to kill her on a weekly basis with the Shego who had saved her from an alien murderer and with whom she'd started to fall in love.

To learn that those two people coexisted inside this woman's head still, and many more people like this Vinchenza?

"So what now?" She finally, rather weakly, inquired after sitting fr a few minutes trying to digest all that.

"There is no 'now,' Miss Possible," Vinchenza sighed a bit, forcing the ghost of Shego back into a bottle and becoming the respected professora again, "Whatever I felt for you needs to stay where it was, in the past with Shego. It's not fair to you to deal with my feelings for a woman who's dead almost a hundred years now… and it's not fair to her that I share feelings with you that were hers.. So you'll take your kid and go back to Earth, and I'll continue being Vinchenza Maria Gomez, teacher and deputy sheriff, until it's time for me to stop that and become someone else somewhere else."

"and that's not fair to me." The redhead scowled. "Shego is no more dead than I am. I saw her here, just a few minutes ago. She's my friend and she's more and she's still a part of you even if you've picked up a new name. And maybe I'd like to get to know Vinchenza Maria Gomez too. And you're not the same person you were twenty five years ago? Well guess what, neither am I! No one is! Me twenty five years ago? That Kim Possible didn't know she could feel things for Shego that involved a long soapy shower. And she damned sure never thought she'd have a one night stand resulting in a child, but I sure do!"

Kim realized she was working up into a rant, and slowly took a breath, clawing a hand through her hair, "Look. I thought that I could cut you out of my life and let you go when you left the last time. I was wrong… it hurt and it sucked and there were a lot of nights when I almost picked up my kimmunicator and ordered Wade or Jime to find you for me; I still do that. Time made those feelings hide away in the back of my brain, but they never faded away. And when I saw you yesterday at the bar I wasn't sure if I should kiss you, or throw you into another microwave tower."

"So what?" the darker woman watched her redheaded counterpart, unsure where all this was going, "You're too young to retire to Mars, which no one does anyway. And I can't just pick up and move to Earth because someone _will_ recognize me."

"The hell you can't…" the redhead rolled her eyes, "You forget, I'm not the person I used to be… this Kim Possible can lie and cheat and steal with the best of them when needs be; and she can hire a private bodyguard for her daughter who she met on the Martian police force. And if anyone happens to think Vinchenza Gomez look like Shego, this Kim Possible will punch them in the mouth."

Vinchenza looked at the redhead. Part of her wanted to jump at the scenario described. But part of her was far more skeptical, "And if I'm not in love with this Kim Possible the way I was with that one?"

"God you always had to be difficult." Kim sighed theatrically, "Look, you may not be getting any older, but I'm not getting any younger. I would like to spend a little time with someone who is my equal in life before I shuffle off this mortal coil. It doesn't have to be a permanent thing, but it will be a thing… Because I know who you are, and I know where you live, and I am going to be pestering you whether you like it or not."

"And you're not going to let me disappear, are you?"

"Not on your life."

* * *

_AN: this more or less wrote itself during the past few days. I'm posting it with reservations, because frankly I like the open ended nature of the first chapter by itself. This still has some openness to it, though… Anyway, the people I showed this too before publication liked it, so I will share it with you folks and hope you enjoy it and review it too. _


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